HUNGARIAN WRITER FRIGYES KARINTHY, in his story Chains (1929), states that human
relationships are determined by a separation of six degrees, or less, from
person to person, a theory popularized by John Guare’s play aptly titled Six Degrees of Separation. But as far as
the dissolution of the subject is concerned, Eduardo Lalo’s novel Simone, recently awarded the
prestigious Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, seems to me like an
extension of such theory if we submit the two main characters to existential
scrutiny. Loneliness, silence, invisibility, desire, language and the city are
the six points of connection/separation between an anonymous narrator -who
looks for meaning in a life made of fragments- and a character who calls
herself Simone.
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| Eduardo Lalo |
As an unprecedented
distinction in Puerto Rican literature, the Romulo Gallegos Prize puts the
Caribbean island in the spotlight of Latin American Literature. No doubt: the
award has been previously granted to distinguished literary presences, such as
Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Bolaño and
Ricardo Piglia, just to name a few. But, as a literary object, Simone is made from the stuff of great works
of literature.
In several ways, the
lives of the two characters helps us to rethink the material conditions of life
in the city of San Juan, which the narrator reconstructs as a collection of
quotes and narrative fragments that underpin the structural principles of the
work. Thus, the formal aspects of the order are superseded almost like a scale
model of the great novel in modern Puerto Rican fiction, En Babia (1940), the long lost and forgotten work by José I. De
Diego Padró, set in New York City, and, most certainly, in Lalo’s the reading
list.
Thus, Simone recreates glance of the flâneur
–the stroller who walks the metropolis- in a small city like San Juan. The
scope even turns and dwindles to lonely afternoons in shopping centers, these
cities within the city that are already social referents in consumerist
societies.
Here, in Simone, we find the musings and
meditations on invisible countries, discharged into the nihilism of the
narrator and trying to make sense of the seemingly unrelated. Here, sadness,
pain, melancholy populate the text as innate states of existence in the
Caribbean.
But language is not
natural: we are not born with it; we must acquire it. Speech is intercourse,
Octavio Paz once wrote. No intercourse, no language.
At the end of the
novel, when Li goes away and becomes a verb in past tense form, the narrator
confesses: "I could not make a gesture or a word." Then he adds:
"My cry for help was silence and immobility."
There is a more
interesting (but less crystalline) portrayal of 21rst century Puerto Rico
underlying Simone: we are a
transcultural nation in the making. The presence of Asian cultures seem like a
natural element in Puerto Rican society, where the Caribbean repeats itself
more than ever, as it converges with European and American cultures. As Lalo
himself put it in a recent interview, “I live in an invisible country”. Maybe
the time has come to start looking at Puerto Rico with new eyes.
But strangely, the
overpowering theme is Simone is love, in its various gradations and its
redemptive possibilities.
Like philosophy, love
is always seeking truth.
It is the glue that
keeps the unnamed writer together as he walks the streets of San Juan, reading
and writing, listening to their passersby, trying to understand them from the distance.
However, the unbearable ordinariness that the city suffers tames the narrator.
San Juan not only is
portrayed as a scorched region, climatologically speaking, but also as a place
with a linear sense of time, complete with expressionlessness and monochromatic
idiosyncrasies. Isn’t the sun a kind of
disease?, asks the narrator at some point. The people in San Juan are not
able to access the city because their poor linguistic capacities. Language,
sometimes truncated and misguided by others, is an impediment. But it requires love
to despise a city.
Enter Simone.
The center of the
narrator’s longings is the woman of Chinese origin whose real name is Li Chao.
Idyllic love arises: disembodied love.
The affair initiates
when Li Chao starts sending a series of anonymous texts that captivate the
narrator. It is a love without physical dimension until they finally meet. "With
arms and legs entwined, our bodies were reborn," says the narrator. The
words take a female form.
Simone was a confessed
lover of the protagonist’s novels, so, almost with a causal relation, mutual
textualities lead to the meeting of the bodies and, hence, to the birth of an
erotic relationship between the two protagonists. Also, the woman will lead our
hero on a journey under the city’s skin to reveal a world inhabited by "invisible"
people. The two loves -the one the writer feels for San Juan and the one he
feels for Li Chao- traverse loneliness, silence, invisibility, desire, language
and the city, and consolidate in a higher love: the love for words.
From a narrative
standpoint, ethical conflicts are linked masterfully to tell a story where,
after all, language is the possibility where we exist and love. You cannot exist
without love, and you cannot love without language.
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